The Bigger They Are

A recent update to Panda has rolled out over the last little while and while everyone likes to cry foul that the search engines play favorites, but as the signals from the last few days become clearer it looks like one of the giants on the web has been targeted with a penalty or two.
This recent update to the Panda portion of the search algorithm has been a true update, not just a typical refresh of the data that happens on a monthly basis. The short version of what they’ve done is that Panda can now interpret different languages easier than they could before, laying the ground work for future updates and additions if needed. So how did this affect a site as large and influential as eBay you might ask? Well it actually has more to do with the people behind the scenes at Google rather than just the algorithm itself.

While it looks like eBay was perhaps affected by the algorithm update a tad, it looks more and more like it has had a manual penalty levied against it for some of it’s urls on the site. Doing a thorough dig through of the urls that were penalized on the eBay site it seems targeted at urls that have “bhp” in them – which is why it looks like a manual penalty instead of terms being caught up in an update.

So what is there to take away from this example? That no matter how big you are you can still be caught running on the wrong side of the search engines and their algorithms. As with previous large companies being caught up though, like BMW and Teleflora for example, I wouldn’t expect eBay to be on the wrong side of the SERPs for long.